Assistive Technology Demo

While speaking about accessibility I’ve realised that for some people the key to understanding why accessibility is so important comes from experiencing how people with disabilities actually use the websites we build. So I’ll be demoing two pieces of assistive technology (AT): 1) Dragon NaturallYSpeaking – voice recognition software and NVDA – a screen reader. 1) Dragon NaturallySpeaking is voice recognition software, typically used by people with motor impairments who are unable to use mouse or keyboard or touch. I’ll demonstrate how people move around within pages, follow links, deal with internet forms, and can emulate mouse movements when they need to. 2) NVDA is a screen reader typically used by those who are blind, or have poor vision, but also sometimes by those with cognitive impairments such as dyslexia. I’ll demonstrate what you hear when a page first loads, how people move around a page, how they can find information they are looking for in pages, how they follow links, and interact with forms and dropdown menus. Along the way we’ll see the challenges faced by users of these products if sites are not well created.

Speaker